good 'n planty

Six weeks ago, I decided that I was going to be more mindful of how I eat.  All I really wanted to do was limit the amount of unnatural chemicals I was ingesting.  At the time, it seemed like an insurmountable goal - but in the span of six weeks, I've become much more ambitious.  It's easy to quickly gain experience with something that interests you.  Luckily, this was the case for me.  As I read blogs and books, and experienced a more organic lifestyle, terms like "nutrition" and "healthy eating" soon became completely relative.  Just because something is healthy for you doesn't mean it hasn't had negative effects for the environment or even other people on its journey to you.
A new goal formed in my mind - I wanted to align my diet and lifestyle so it promoted good health in every sense.  I began to eat most of my meals from locally raised food products - milk and cheese from small area dairies, apples from local orchards, vegetables from the farmers who grew them, etc.  I even became interested in producing some of my own food!  After planting my first ever batch of heirloom seeds several weeks ago, I'm nearly ready to transplant them into a rooftop container garden.  All of these things are great - I'm reducing my carbon footprint, maintaining a healthy diet, and increasing the viability of organic farming, but that isn't all.  Everyday that passes, I become more conscious of the interconnectedness of life - definitely not a lesson I planned to learn from changing my diet.  

More recently, I've been researching various methods of fasting as a way to detox my body from some of the long-term effects already crystallized in me.  I'm thinking a juice fast will be the best bet for me for two reasons - first, juice fasting doesn't require you to drastically change your lifestyle (ie, become sedentary), and second, I live a block away from the Italian Market.  Usually the fruit is just on the verge of going bad, but for juicing purposes, I think that will be ideal.  

In other news, a lot of books about herbs and various medicinal uses have crossed my path lately and I have to say it's pretty interesting stuff.  I'd like to learn more about the whole subject of herbology and maybe start an herb garden.  If anyone has a recommendation about books, web sites, etc, I'd love to hear them!  

Last but not least, check out my tomatoes!  


One variety (Silver Fir) has a splintered leaf structure, while the other (Bloody Butcher) looks more like a regular leaf.  Does that indicate anything?  I'm ecstatic about how much they've grown in the past week alone...and I'm really looking forward to eating tomatoes that I've grown myself.  

This is part #5 of a weekly series, so please bookmark this site if you want to follow me and my zany adventures. I'm also very interested in your feedback - questions, comments, advice, name-calling, etc. Thanks for reading!

I'm happy to report that I had an enlightening weekend.  On Friday morning, I took the worm bin up to my roof, dug through the muck and transfered as many worms as I could save to a bin containing the dirt I plan to use for the veggie plants.  I'm not sure what I did wrong, but based on everything I've seen of "healthy" worm bins, mine was way off.  The food was rotting, the smell was horrible, the worms wanted to chill out among the rocks in the bottom of the bin...it was a mess. The worms seem to be enjoying their new environment much more, and I'm on to greener pastures.  The seedlings are doing pretty well - zucchini's continue to dominate the scene, and it seems like the Chinese eggplants are in last place for moment.  I ended up building a window sill and attaching it outside my bedroom window for my herbs.  They seem to be managing but, they're not very lively.  I bought them at a small gardening store, so maybe they're just not good quality?  
 
I was at Reading Terminal on Sunday with my friend Rachel, who was telling me about some of the things she's been learning to cook recently.  We decided to try a broccoli and cheese quiche for dinner so between the market and a quick stop at Whole Foods, all the ingredients were gathered and we were ready to go.  Everything was going well until we forgot to steam the broccoli before adding it to the eggs, but after a quick and slimy game of bobbing for broccoli (something I hope I never do again), everything turned out extraordinarily well.  The flavor of the broccoli mixed with garlic colby and cheddar cheese from a local dairy was unbelievable.  It took a lot longer in the oven then I would have expected - I'd say it was 45 minutes or more of baking time.  The ensuing recipe (from what I remember, she's the self-proclaimed quiche expert after-all) was something like this:

4 eggs
1/2 cup of raw milk
not quite 1 lb of broccoli, crumbled into pieces
salt and pepper to taste
cheddar and garlic colby cheese, finely cubed
1 pie-crust
 
Whisk eggs with milk, salt and pepper.  
Steam broccoli until tender and add it and the cheese to the egg mixture.  
Pour into pie crust and bake in a preheated 350º oven until an inserted knife comes out clean. 

I broiled the whole thing for a few minutes to make the top a more golden brown, but I'm pretty sure that's totally optional.  We ended up eating the whole thing, but if you're not a gluttonous monster you could probably keep this in your fridge for a few days.

I also bought some spelt flour while I was at the market yesterday, because I've had a huge hankering for pancakes or crepes lately, not to mention eating eggs for breakfast every morning is starting to get old.  I adapted a version of this recipe this morning, with some success and a much better idea of how to do it in the future (not 'adapting' recipes your first time making them would probably also work).

2 heaping tablespoons each wheat and spelt flour (1.5 cups)
1 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sugar
pinch salt
3 tbsp butter, melted
3 eggs, separated
1 cup milk

Mix together dry ingredients
Mix and incorporate milk and egg yolks
Beat egg whites to stiff peaks and fold into batter
Slowly fold in melted butter (I mixed this in with the first egg mixture...whoops?)
Ladle onto hot greased fry pan

The recipe I started with seemed like it would be way too watery, so I cut back on the milk.  It did end up kind of thin, but that could be for a number of reasons.  I didn't add the melted butter at the right time, and I think I didn't use enough of it (3/4 of a cup seemed like a LOT of butter).  I also had no idea what "whip egg whites into stiff peaks" meant and I was terrified to find out the results I'd get from Googling any permutation of that phrase, so I just whisked them until my the muscles in my forearm started to burn and hoped that would be adequate.  I made one test-cake which turned out more like a crepe because the batter was so thin, so I decided to add more flour.  It did thicken it enough, but it seemed to make them a little more dry, but that could also be due to the fact that I used wheat and spelt flour as opposed to regular white flour which I think the recipe was assuming.  

All things considered I'm really happy with how this week went.  I feel absolutely no stress about this since I made things a little more casual (see last weeks post) plus I'm eating delicious, healthy food.  When we were quiche-ing on Sunday night, Rachel looked at me almost in awe and said, "Wow, this is really super healthy!"  Part of the novelty of this crazy "eating well" thing has worn off, but I'm still just as excited.  

This is part #4 of a weekly series, so please bookmark this site if you want to follow me and my zany adventures. I'm also very interested in your feedback - questions, comments, advice, name-calling, etc. Thanks for reading!

Earlier this week, I was extremely frustrated by the difficulties I now deal with daily because of my change in diet.  I completely understand why I always ate out of convenience before - this is time-consuming and difficult. Maybe it’s just my schedule, maybe it’s one of a hundred possible other things, but I feel as though I’m constantly rushing. I felt that before, yes, but it’s become much more pronounced because now food has taken its own special place in my day next to work and whatever miscellaneous side-projects I have going on at the moment. I do feel like I have more energy, I know I'm making a difference in my overall long-term health, and I've even lost a little weight, but in my mind these are all "big picture" things, and not very good at influencing my immediate decisions.  As I thought more and more about this, and my new diet in general, I started to focus on the progress I'd made rather than whatever arbitrary rules I had broken.  As displeasing as it was for me to come to terms with this, I had become a dietary legalist, picking apart my food choices and judging them as intensely as a foodie version of Helen Lovejoy.  The most difficult thing to accept after reading a book like Animal, Vegetable, Mineral is that it takes time and experience to change your habits.  Sure, the book charted a year in the author's life, but I read that book in three days!  Surely it couldn't take much longer than that to become a proficient locavore.  However, I don't regret my blind and ignorant excitement because it helped to encourage change while my newly developing habits were playing catch up.  

As time has passed, thing have certainly become easier.  Impulse control is huge when you're trying to change how you eat, and it's particularly troubling when you're hungry but have nothing "good" immediately available.  Over the past few weeks I've made it a point to always have some sort of fresh fruit in my house (this week it's apples) as well as organic cereal and yogurt, so when I do get hungry I have better options then an energy bar or something sleazy from Wawa.  I've also found a lot of great resources, including the stands at Reading Terminal and local farmer's markets, which make it much easier to keep the faith, so to speak.  

The final thing this week that really struck me is how powerful your perceptions are when adapting to change.  This is as true for my particular diet as it is for any, or any kind of life change you're going through (willingly or not).  I'm going to include a quick story based on an old Chinese folk tale, partly because it's awesome, and partly because it's dead on point with what I'm trying to say:

One day, a troubled young man came to his master and asked, "Master, what is the difference between happiness and suffering?"  The wise old man told him that there was no physical difference, and told a story about heaven and hell to illustrate his point.   "Many years ago, a man was allowed to visit the afterlife," he said.  "In both places the visitor saw many people seated at a table on which many delicious foods were laid out. Chopsticks over a meter long were tied to their right hands, while their left hands were tied to their chairs. In hell, no matter how much they stretched their arms, the chopsticks were too long for them to get food into their mouths. They grew impatient and got their hands and chopsticks tangled with one another's. The delicacies were scattered here and there and everyone was upset and hungry.  In heaven, on the other hand, people happily used the long chopsticks to pick out someone else's favorite food and feed it to him, and in turn they were fed by others."

As I said before, focusing on the positive effects I'm creating for myself and the world around me makes it much easier to stay on track than if I were to constantly dwell on the fact that I can't eat whatever greasy and delicious food those around me are enjoying.  I needed to toss out all the ideas of rules I had in my mind.  There's no prize at the end, and I'm not going to receive a bigger trophy if I never cross my imaginary lines.  If I do occasionally eat Chinese take-out or random bar food, it's not the end of the world.  Granted, I don't want this to be the norm, but my mind has already built associations with these things to the point that I feel queasy thinking about them.  If 80% of my meals are organic and locally produced, not only will I be conserving huge amounts of fossil fuel and promoting sustainable agriculture, I'll also see most, if not all, of the benefits a healthy diet provides.  

In other news, my worms seem to be happily chomping away, almost all of my seeds have begun to sprout, and I even bought some herbs to grow outside my kitchen windows in hanging baskets.  Wednesday is trash day, so I'm planning on doing a bit of dumpster diving to find some items that I can use as planters for my rooftop container garden.  Wish me luck!  

This is part #3 of a weekly series, so please bookmark this site if you want to follow me and my zany adventures. I'm also very interested in your feedback - questions, comments, advice, name-calling, etc. Thanks for reading!

Part 2
Part 1 

I'm not quite a true product of the internet age. I believe the first time I logged on to the now antiquated America Online, I was somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 years old, so I can remember the world before "e-" meant anything but shorthand for an electron, but it's vague. That being said, I'm used to being able to find anything, from anywhere, in about 3 minutes. However, when it came to finding healthy local food, my searching prowess was brought to it's knees.

Philadelphia is famous for it's collection of local-food-serving mom and pop BYOB's, but raw ingredients, to the uninitiated, are hard to come by. I recently found some great "locavore" resource sites, including Farm-to-Philly and PhillyFoodShed, but even these I only found as a by-product of reading through archived articles in local newspapers. The local food clique has been, so far, maddeningly difficult to penetrate. On the advice of one of these articles, I visited the Fair Food Farmstand in the Reading Terminal Market this morning. As I was checking out, I asked the guy behind the counter how long they'd been here. He thought for a second and said, "Something like six years. We started as a folding table once a week and now we're here every day." I mentioned that I was just becoming interested in a more local diet, but I couldn't believe how long it took me to find out about the stand. "Unfortunately," he said, "we're the market's best kept secret." I can't help but wonder how many other "best kept secrets" I'm still in the dark about. While I'm becoming satisfied with my ability to find fruit, vegetables, and even dairy, fresh meat is still under the radar.

As I said before, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral made quite an impact on me. One of the more telling effects was making me excited to try to grow something myself. Even before I was done the book, I had an order queued at Seed Savers, and talked to my dad about splitting some of them with me, since I wouldn't use all of them. Since then, I've purchased Jiffy peat pots and ordered the aforementioned seeds online. My order looked something like this:

Brittle Wax Beans
Silvery Fir Tree Tomato
Bloody Butcher Tomato
Ping Tung Long Eggplant
Florida High Bush Eggplant
Black Beauty Zucchini Squash

The seeds were shipped to my parents house, since they're using more of them, and they sent me some this week. I haven't gotten them yet, but it should only be a matter of days. I was concerned about how to grow them after they're out of the seedling phase, and I kicked around growing a container garden on my roof, until I discovered there is a community garden behind a church building literally right across the street from me. It's called Bel Arbor Community Garden. I started getting my hopes up and having school-girl daydreams of growing the most delicious vegetables in the history of humankind, but was interrupted when I found out all the spots are full and there's quite a waiting list. Container garden it is, I suppose. I won't have to worry about that for a few more weeks, so I'm going to (unwisely, I imagine) not think about it yet.

I've also been interested in some sort of composting for some time, and in talking with Abby, I discovered vermicomposting. I found these instructions online, bought 2000 red wigglers from Uncle Jim's Worm Farm and a shallow 17 gallon Rubbermaid container and got to work.


I haven't really had any results yet, but it seems to be working. For the first few days, there were a lot of worms who thought it was smart to leave their oasis of refuse for a linoleum desert, but that seems to have stopped. Also they're showing a clear preference for cantaloupe.

This is part #2 of a weekly series, so please bookmark this site if you want to follow me and my zany adventures. I'm also very interested in your feedback - questions, comments, advice, name-calling, etc. Thanks for reading!

Several weeks ago, my friend Dax contacted me to talk about his environmental concerns and questions about switching to an organic diet and lifestyle. His journey to figuring out the best solutions for himself and the environment isn't unique- it's a challenge I face along with many others. We decided to share his challenges and successes here... we hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to give us your input.

On March 11, 2008, there was an article in the paper about prescription drugs leeching into the water supply of many major cities. I had been concerned for some time about what kind of things were going into my body disguised as food, but it was always more of a nagging background issue - something that was frightening, but in the same vague way that global thermonuclear war is.  It's not a threat that manifests itself in everyday tangible terms, so it becomes pretty easy to ignore, particularly when really thinking about it is terrifying.

Despite my perceived threat level (mild or insane as you might think it), the concrete proof that something as ubiquitous as my drinking water was contaminating me with unknown substances was alarming to say the least.  I knew I had to make some changes, and I figured the sooner I made them, the better it would be.  I knew Abby is involved with Rodale and Organic Gardening, so I contacted her to pick her brain a bit, but also to discuss a way to document my experience.  The first thing she recommended was to read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  I told her I would do some more research and contact her again when I had a better handle of what I wanted to do.  
I want to make it clear why I’m doing this - I don’t feel that I’m overweight, I’m not trying to cut carbs, increase muscle or save the whales.  I simply want to cut unnatural chemicals and additives from my diet.  If I cannot find meat or dairy products that allow me to do this (or if they are outside of my budget), then I’ll be a vegetarian.  I just want to reinforce that this is not my aim.  I expect that I will lose some weight in the process, but again, this will only be a side-effect of deliberate eating. 
I began keeping track of everything that I ate, including an estimated cost.  The impact it had on me was immediate and much more significant than I could have expected.  The very first day that I started recording  my eating habits, I realized just how poor my diet can be, and more importantly on what it's based: convenience.  That doesn't sound terrible, particularly to the average American for whom multi-tasking is a now a cultural imperative, but it translated to my diet consisting of empty calories, processed sugar, and booze.  Awesome, right?  It really is terrible when you look at it objectively, but how many Americans (particularly of my generation) eat this way on a daily basis?

So that was the idea, and I've spent the past several weeks deciding how I want to make it a reality.  I planned on beginning a chemical/additive-free diet by April 1, 2008, which gave me a little over 2 weeks to plan out and nail down what exactly I’d be cutting out of my life, and more importantly what I’d be able to include.   

Before I go any further, let me introduce myself and where I'm coming from in terms of diet: my name is Dax DeFranco, I’m 22 years old and live in Philadelphia.  I would estimate that I weigh about 150-160 lbs, and I’m 5’8”.  I drink socially (by that definition, I’m a regular Rubirosa) and don’t work out frequently, besides doing yoga on my own 3-4 times times a week.  I don’t have a car (partly for environmental reasons, partly for economic reasons, partly because there’s really no reason to have a car if you live in an urban environment), so my main transportation is my bicycle.  I would say that I’m in average shape, but could stand to be much more fit.  I cook twice or three times a week (lots of stir-fries, but I like to cook so I do experiment with new flavors and ingredients pretty often) but usually find myself eating out.  This is due in part to the fact that my kitchen is usually messy, but is mostly for convenience.  I work six days a week at unconventional hours, so my food choices are often dominated by time factors.  When I get home from work, it’s easier to stop at a bar that serves food or one of the noodle places near my house than to cook something.  When I wake up, I might make breakfast  but sometimes I just wait until I'm on my way to work to eat.  I don’t ordinarily eat fast food (McDonald’s, etc), but it has been known to happen once or twice every few months.  I eat a reasonable amount of fruits, vegetables, nuts, and grains, but usually prefer a burger to a salad.

My diet has already started to change considerably in the time since I've started doing research.  I purchased Animal, Vegetable, Mineral a few days after Abby recommended it and I can't even describe how much of an impact it had on me.  It definitely shifted my perspective from chemical-free to bigger picture sustainability.  It really drives home the "we're all in this together" message.  My grandfather has a farm in the Poconos, and I've baled hay, seen piglets being born, and a good deal of things in between, but food as a journey from soil to stomach is not something I ever really thought about.  In terms of nutrition alone there might be no difference between an apple from New Jersey and one from South America, but there is a great deal of collateral damage that's going on behind the scenes.  All I'm trying to say is that what you choose to purchase (or not purchase) has a great deal of power to shape your environment - and it doesn't take much.  The same purchase that supports local organic farming creates wealth in your community, reduces carbon emissions by decreasing how far your food travels, and chips away at corporate control over our choices. 

This would all be much easier, of course, if it was as easy to buy locally-grown organic anything as it is to buy a fast food burger.  One of the first things that really put a damper on my save-the-world-one-meal-at-a-time attitude was seeing the lack of places to find quality food "on the go" as compared to the utter inundation of processed slop available cheaply and quickly.  I realize this sounds insane, but I don't think I'm alone in admitting that I rarely looked at the label of anything before I bought it.  So far, I've learned two pretty important lessons which should provide a good base to start all this:
 
    1. Shopping with my brain instead of my stomach has created a significant change in my behavior and eating habits.
    2. Planning your diet in advance is a huge necessity - and one I haven't mastered yet.  You need to always have options.
This is part #1 of a weekly series, so please bookmark this site if you want to follow me and my zany adventures.  I'm also very interested in your feedback - questions, comments, advice, name-calling, etc. Thanks for reading!